Everyone Is On The Worship Team

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This week (3/15/2006) we empha­size that wor­ship is not a con­cert, it is a col­lab­o­ra­tion. It is not about per­for­mance, it is about par­tic­i­pa­tion. In the final analy­sis, every­one is on the wor­ship team.

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Every­one Is On The Wor­ship Team
MP3 Length: 29:24
MP3 Size: 12 MB

Some Bib­li­cal Expres­sions of Cor­po­rate Worship

  • Singing: the book of Psalms, Eph­esians 5:19, Colos­sians 3:16
  • Music: 1st Chron­i­cles 13:8, Psalm 33:3, Psalm 150
  • Artis­tic Cre­ation: Exo­dus 31:1–11, Exo­dus 28, Ezekiel 4:1
  • Clap­ping: Psalm 47:1, Isa­iah 55:12
  • Words: Psalm 9:1, Psalm 73:28, Psalm 78:4–6
  • Laugh­ing & Rejoic­ing: Psalm 9:2, Psalm 126:1–3, Psalm 149:5, Zepha­niah 3:14–17
  • Shout­ing: Psalm 95:1, Psalm 98:4–6, Psalm 100:1
  • Silence: Psalm 46:10, Habakkuk 2:20
  • Stand­ing: 1st Chron­i­cles 23:30, Psalm 24:3–6
  • Rais­ing Our Hands: Nehemiah 8:6, Psalm 63:3–5, Psalm 134:1–2, 1st Tim­o­thy 2:8
  • Bow­ing & Kneel­ing: 2 Chron­i­cles 7:3, Psalm 95:6, Daniel 6:10–11
  • Lying Pros­trate: Deuteron­omy 9:18, Rev­e­la­tion 19:4
  • Leap­ing: 2nd Samuel 6:16, Luke 6:23, Acts 3:7–8
  • Danc­ing: Exo­dus 15:20–21, Psalm 149:3, Psalm 150:4
  • Speak­ing In Tongues: Acts 10:45–46; 1 Corinthi­ans 14:26–33

There are dif­fer­ent ways to cat­e­go­rize these expres­sions. For exam­ple, you could break them down into ver­bal, phys­i­cal, and impul­sive dis­plays of wor­ship. You could cat­e­go­rize them as inwardly focused or out­wardly focused. Which way you men­tally group them is irrel­e­vant: what mat­ters is that you remain open to all of them.

Some addi­tional thoughts:

While still an athe­ist, Lewis had a hard time under­stand­ing why God would com­mand peo­ple to wor­ship Him. This seemed very petty to Lewis. After con­vert­ing, Lewis reflected fur­ther on the nature of praise.

But the most obvi­ous fact about praise—whether of God or any thing—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of com­pli­ment, approval, or the giv­ing of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoy­ment spon­ta­neously over­flows into praise unless (some­times even if) shy­ness or the fear of bor­ing oth­ers is delib­er­ately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise-lovers prais­ing their mis­tresses, read­ers their favorite poet, walk­ers prais­ing the coun­try­side, play­ers prais­ing their favorite game-praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, col­leges, coun­tries, his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages, chil­dren, flow­ers, moun­tains, rare stamps, rare bee­tles, even some­times politi­cians or schol­ars. I had not noticed how the hum­blest, and at the same time most bal­anced and capa­cious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, mis­fits and mal­con­tents praised least … I had not noticed either that just as men spon­ta­neously praise what ever they value, so they spon­ta­neously urge us to join them in prais­ing it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glo­ri­ous? Don’t you think that mag­nif­i­cent?” The Psalmists in telling every­one to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more gen­eral, dif­fi­culty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly deny­ing to us, as regards the supremely Valu­able, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about every­thing else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but com­pletes the enjoy­ment; it is its appointed con­sum­ma­tion. It is not out of com­pli­ment that lovers keep on telling one another how beau­ti­ful they are; the delight is incom­plete till it is expressed.

C. S. Lewis, Reflec­tions on the Psalms, pp. 93–95.

In a con­fer­ence lec­ture [Mary Jo Leddy] reported that the playwright-president of the Czech Repub­lic, Vaclav Havel, was asked why the “Vel­vet Rev­o­lu­tion” against the com­mu­nists in the for­mer Czecho­slo­va­kia was suc­cess­fully nonviolent—and we might add, why it remains effec­tive when so many other satel­lites of the for­mer USSR are presently in tur­moil. Havel answered some­what like this: “We had our par­al­lel soci­ety. And in that par­al­lel soci­ety we wrote our plays and sang our songs and read our poems until we knew the truth so well that we could go out to the streets of Prague and say, ‘We don’t believe your lies anymore’—and com­mu­nism had to fall.”

Marva Dawn, Wor­ship To Form A Mis­sional Com­mu­nity,(for the orig­i­nal Havel quo­ta­tion, see Mary Jo Leddy’s address in the vol­ume from the con­fer­ence Con­fi­dent Witness—Changing World, ed. Craig Van Gelder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd­mans, 1999).